What this lady should do to make proper, non-cheating Turkey Bolognese:
Painstakingly chop all vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, garlic).Simmer the sauce on the stove for a minimum of two hours, all day if you are going for bonafide nonna status.Make the pasta from scratch.Use heavy cream.Use some wine in the sauce. Drink the rest with dinner.
Oh, and she probably shouldn’t be using turkey. What this lady actually did:
Leave the veggies chunky and declare them “rustic.” Because it’s so much faster.Ditch the celery. Because one less veggie to chop.Simmer the sauce for 10 minutes, then taste it to see if it’s “close enough.” (Spoiler, it’s delicious!)Use high-quality, premade refrigerated pasta instead of making from-scratch pasta (more on that in a moment).Use wine in the sauce. Drink more wine while making pasta. Open a new bottle to serve with dinner if necessary. Because cook’s prerogative.Use regular milk instead of heavy cream and ground turkey instead of beef to make the bolognese healthy. Because more room for dessert!
You can call it “cheating,” “experimentation,” or “this is what was in my pantry, so let’s go with it.” Regardless of how you decide to describe it, adapting classic recipes is, for me, what keeps cooking exciting and seasonal. In the case of Turkey Bolognese, adapting makes it achievable on a weeknight.
Healthy Turkey Bolognese — Tips for Fast Bolognese Sauce
Classic bolognese sauce usually takes hours to prepare and can be on the heavy side. My goal to transform it into a lighter but still comforting healthy Turkey Bolognese recipe that’s ready in 45 minutes, while a little tricky, turned out to be even more delicious than I’d dreamed! I swapped the traditional ground beef for ground turkey, adding extra seasoning to keep it from tasting bland. The heavy cream I ditched in favor of whole milk, which still yielded a sauce that tasted thick and decadent. The trickiest part was figuring out a way to make the bolognese sauce taste as if it had been simmering for hours instead of minutes. Tomato paste, which has an intense flavor, along with a bold red wine did the trick (just as they enrich the sauce in my Red Wine Braised Short Ribs!).
Turkey Bolognese – Freezer Friendly Pasta Sauce
This recipe makes a generous amount of the turkey bolognese sauce. The leftovers freeze easily, so you can enjoy them at a later date or simply cook a bit of extra pasta to suit the size of your crowd.
To Freeze. Place leftover sauce in an airtight freezer-safe storage container in the freezer for up to 3 months. Let thaw overnight in the refrigerator.
